What’s Your Natural Habitat?

I sit facing my computer screen, inches from a large window. My heart thunks. Outside a shadow moves. A moose peers at me. Vividly tall, she is furry, sturdy, six feet away, eyes glued in stillness. Her nose twitches. I catch my breath, meet her gaze. Seconds pass. Does she comprehend glass? Does it matter? When her shoulder muscles flick, she turns away, hooves crunching tracks through the snow crust. I remain, untangled. My breath is slow and deep.

How can we cultivate compassion when the world we inhabit may be hostile, stressful, aggressive, and painful? It is simple, but not easy, and requires our ongoing commitment. Compassion is not reliant upon ease of circumstance. Some of the most trustworthy, compassionate people I know have suffered profoundly. Paula D’Arcy writes, “How you approach something determines what you will see.” Roshi Joan Halifax tells us, “The world is so tangled, and I need to be somewhat untangled to meet it.” These are good insights. We cannot give what we do not have. What we cultivate is shared with others.

To cultivate compassion we must first show up and be available to place, time, and our embodied self. This prepares us to meet someone or something with integrity and presence. We each live a sacred story with particularities and peculiarities unique to our personality, life experiences, and our decisions of yes, no, and maybe.

Three moose wander in my yard—it is their natural habitat. The two twins were birthed when sun shone for twenty hours a day. Lush green ferns and foliage sheltered their tentative beginnings. Months later, I now sit in silence. Two feet of snow arrived, and neighbors help one another in time of need. I do not live in a wildlife preserve or zoo. Bear tracks across my driveway startle me from complacency. While outdoors, I am calmly alert, with a choice to engage the realness of time and place. I am interwoven in this landscape, a part of it. How will I forge connection and compassion in this climate?

Do you understand my question? Perhaps it needs translation: Where do you live—what is your natural habitat? Who do you encounter with your everyday activity? What causes you to stop in awe and wonder? Where do you rub up against fear and disconnect? These are essential questions in the marketplace or monastery, the inner city, suburbia, or wilderness. Thomas Merton said, “The deepest level of communication is not communication but communion. It is wordless.”

What can your natural habitat teach you? A spiritual director can accompany you when you share your stories of desire, surprise, fear, hope, and despair. Rabbi Awraham Soetendorp reminds us, “The teaching of compassion, the exercise of the soul, will open the heart. And then nothing will be impossible.”

How do you cultivate compassion through the concrete specifics of your life?

–Pegge Bernecker, editor

Excerpt from Listen: A Seeker’s Resource for Spiritual Direction, Vol. 5.1, “Cultivating Compassion” by Pegge Bernecker, (Spiritual Directors International (c) 2011). Used with the permission of Spiritual Directors International. To order copies or a FREE subscription to Listen: A Seeker’s Resource for Spiritual Direction call 1-425-455-1565 or go to www.sdiworld.org.

Lent Dance: A Turning Back, A Turning Toward

Wednesday, 17 February, marks Ash Wednesday, when the Season of Lent begins for Christians. What makes Ash Wednesday and Lent significant, year after year?

A Christian Response

I engage in daily prayer and meditation. Over dozens of years, a variety of spiritual practices have, at one time or another, given life, been shed, and occasionally re-embraced. A consistent thread is to make deliberate time periods for intentional reflection and turning toward God. Why is this important? In this time of my life I want to be a whole person, delightfully alive, and hallowed into radical authenticity and vivid presence. I know that God unabashedly loves me—and everyone who I desire to serve with mutuality, friendship, and compassionate care. I want to participate as fully as I can in God’s ongoing love affair with humanity and all of the cosmos.

Spirituality is not a separate part of who I am every day—it is embodied and experienced through my senses and life particulars. I welcome the defined time period of Lent to turn to God with my whole self. This turning is ultimately toward the world.

An Olympic Story

Tonight I watched Olympic figure skating, pondered Lent, and allowed the Hebrew Scripture, “Return to me with your whole heart” (Jl 2:12) to glide within me. I looked at ice dancers become grace in motion—turning, spinning, twirling, arching, moving towards, away, tucking and reaching. I visually experienced the spiritual journey. Surely it encompasses all these moves. We are not meant to be spectators in life! We are invited to engage, participate, train, fall, glide, spin, embrace, and turn towards one another and God. Music dances through our soul, as rhythm glides into expression in our body and daily life.

Spiritual Guidance

Ash Wednesday and Lent invite a fresh turning—or return—to God’s embrace. As much as each of us is on a solitary journey, it is also communal. Meeting with a spiritual director can encourage genuine seeking and conversion. During spiritual direction we are accompanied in our turning to God with our whole heart, broken heart, or dancing heart.

Will you join me in turning toward spiritual practice, a daily discipline, and a radical acceptance of wholeness and connection with all of creation? Lent can spring the frozen places in our heart and actions, thaw our resistance to compassionate love, and grow our sacred dance with the Beloved.

If you are seeking a spiritual director to accompany you, click here to discover good questions and spiritual directors to interview through the online, searchable: Seek and Find: A Worldwide Resource Guide of Available Spiritual Directors.

Note: I wrote this post for my work with Spiritual Directors International. It is on the SDI blog, and titled Lent Dance: A Turning Back, A Turning Toward by Pegge Bernecker.

Christmas—Giving Birth to Love

Christians begin celebrating the feast of Christmas today. Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays rings throughout homes, in cars, on radios, in shopping malls, through halls and walls of buildings and businesses, on computer and cell phone screens. Merry Christmas reigns in streets where kids die, and where poverty, abandonment and abuse deepens. For practicing Christians, Christmas is a time to engage the significance of the incarnation, the birth of Jesus Christ in everyday life.

The invitation for us to ponder at Christmas could begin as simple as this,

How might love want to birth within me?

The cosmic Christmas tree star cluster

The Gift

God did not come into the world wrapped with a shiny red bow, pretty and perfect, labeled precisely. No, God came as a vulnerable, helpless infant who needs us as much as we need God. Emmanuel, “God-With-Us” is birthed, unwrapped, and encountered within us and through our own ordinary and mysterious life experience. In the article “The Eternal Christ in the Cosmic Story” Richard Rohr, OFM, explains, “… Christianity is not just that we believe in God. The mystery we are about is much more than that: It’s that the material and the spiritual coexist. It’s the mystery of the Incarnation. Once we restore the idea that the Incarnation means God truly loves creation then we restore the sacred dimension to nature.”

Celebrate the Twelve Days of Christmas!

Christmas is not over on December 26. The Feast of Christmas begins on December 25, and culminates January 6, on the Feast of Epiphany. Every day is an opportunity to say yes to love, and wake up to the present moment. For the Twelve Days of Christmas we can practice genuine delight and forgiveness. We can gaze at people and our world with wonder and reverence. We can play with our family and friends. We can be willing to reach out with compassion to a stranger or someone in need. We can offer understanding and courage in difficult situations. We can receive, celebrate, feast, and rejoice in the reality that the material and the spiritual coexist, and that “the word became flesh.” We can become grateful for the gift of the incarnation of God!

Please join the many spiritual seekers who want to unwrap the ever-deepening meaning of “Yes, I will give birth to love. There is room and desire within me.”

Merry Christmas, Joy to the World!

Where Are You From?

I’m in the midst of a powerful writing project. A question ripples in me, and I pose it to you.

Where are you from?
Who are the people, places and experiences  that shape and form the amazing critter of you?

My son, Justin, answered this question in a high school writing class. The morning after he died, oh so unexpectedly, the school principal called me, asking if she could come to my house. She brought me his words–a poignant, life-giving gift. I am grateful. And, in this month of November, I am thankful.
Where are you from? Who will appreciate your response?

Where I Am From

by Justin Bernecker, 11/1/05

I am from the sweaty track jerseys
and smelly track shoes.
Tired muscles and over worked bodies,
Hard breathing that only comes from
hard work.

I am from the sweet smelling mountain
peaks of Colorado,
the dusty windswept deserts in Arizona
to the salty shores of Alaska.

I am from the neatly cut grass in
my backyard to the hammock
hanging between two trees.
The lonely rake that stands alone
against the wall, forgotten by
those who used it last.

I am from the cold lakes that gradually
warm in the summer,
to the boats that gently rock in the
gentle breeze blowing from the south.
To the fish that play in the shadows
of the trees, and the crawfish
that make their homes under the rocks.

I am from the fruit trees spilling over
with ripe fruit calling out to
be picked by young hands
to the boys sitting, laughing on the fence
posts, watching the cotton candy clouds
float by in that endless blue sky.

I am from the wheat fields that
gently sway in the summer wind
the sweat that comes in from cutting
wood all day under a blazing sun.

I am from the “Go on, do something outside”
type of family that raised me so well.

I am from the deer spaghetti, overflowing
With rich red sauce, to the traditional wild
turkey that we eat on thanksgiving.
The wild salmon that we catch off of the
river and smoke up at the lodge for the
guests to enjoy for their dinner.

This is who I am.

Justin Bernecker. Kachemak Bay, Alaska, 2005.

Spring Growth During Lent

Spring Growth During Lent Posted by PeggeBernecker at 3/27/2009 3:10 PM CDT    http://www.chron.com/channel/houstonbelief/commons/searching.html

Spring Growth during Lent

When I hear the word “Lent” I initially think of Christianity, forty days, and a time of spiritual discipline and purification. However, do you know that the word “Lent” also means “spring?” It can be valuable to notice the significance of “spring” in terms of spiritual discipline and practice.

If you were given forty days to practice “springing” something new in your life, what would that be? Imagine how your life might feel and look if … (pause to take a minute to think about this, right now!)

Picture what you want to bud or grow alive in you. Ponder: “what can I move towards?” instead of a slightly restrictive quest of “what can I give up?” While the process of giving something up is good, it can be a limiting or contracting way of thinking, acting, and being. Give yourself permission to believe in expansion and possibility. Let this be the foundation for your action.

So, I ask myself—and you—this question: What needs to shift in me if I want to think, act, and love in a way that is healthy and life-giving for myself and the people who encounter me? In other words, “what characteristics and behaviors do I hold as an ideal, that I want to move towards?” Asking this question shifts our intention and motivation, enabling permanent, significant change beyond forty days.

You might have an easy time with this reflection, and incorporate guidance from an existing prayer practice or spiritual discipline. You may have a relationship with God, the Holy One, or the Divine that guides you in knowing what needs to spring alive in you. Maybe you seek a relationship with the transcendent other and that in itself is what springs alive in you, needing attention. Perhaps at this time in your life you desire to live a life of significance and meaning—within your fullest human potential—without a relationship with God, organized religion, or another community of spiritual practice. Wherever this time of your life finds you, it is always good to occasionally stop, access, evaluate, and act anew.

Will you give yourself permission to grow new life through your discipline, prayer, and spiritual practice? How will your Lenten fast plant seeds for the fifty day Christian Easter season feast? Although only two weeks remain in the traditional Lenten season, what needs to thaw and break apart so new life can spring alive in you, bringing wholeness and healing to the world you inhabit?